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Ripple CEO Brad Garlinghouse (Stephen McCarthy/Getty Images)

XRP gives back recent gains after Ripple’s announcement of $500 million investment

Ripple is also jump-starting a pilot program with Mastercard, WebBank, and Gemini to explore settling credit card transactions on the XRP Ledger.

Sage D. Young

Ripple, the company behind XRP and its largest holder, announced Wednesday a $500 million investment at a $40 billion valuation from a number of crypto investment shops, including Pantera Capital and Galaxy Digital.

On the same day, the firm also announced a pilot initiative with Mastercard, WebBank, and Gemini to explore using Ripple’s stablecoin RLUSD on the XRP Ledger for fiat credit card transactions, marking “one of the first collaborations where a regulated U.S. bank settles traditional card transactions using a regulated stablecoin on a public blockchain.”

The news sent the token’s price up to the $2.38 level, bucking a larger trend that has seen most cryptocurrency prices drop. Unfortunately, the market’s optimism faded and the price of XRP has dropped over 5% from that recent high as of 11:30 a.m. ET.

Meanwhile, RLUSD has seen a 30% increase in its supply over the last month, bringing its market capitalization to over $1 billion. Kairos Research cofounder Ian Unsworth predicts the supply of all stablecoins in the crypto space will exceed 1 trillion within the next two years, and sees Ripple’s stablecoin crossing the 1 billion supply mark as a great development.

“A wider variety of players will only encourage competition, and competition is what healthy markets need to deliver the best products to end users,” Unsworth told Sherwood News. 

Delphi Digital analyst Simon Shockey said, “The stablecoin pilot and fundraising round show they’re trying to rebrand from a legacy token company into a full-fledged fintech and payments business.”

Shockey added, “It’s hard not to see this as a precursor to going public at some point.”

The developments follow Bitwise and Grayscale revealing fees for their upcoming spot XRP ETFs, which hope to join an increasingly crowded altcoin ETF race.

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Ripple launches treasury platform to manage cash and cryptocurrencies

Ripple, the firm closely tied to the fifth-largest cryptocurrency, XRP, introduced a new treasury platform for digital asset and traditional cash management for users like financial officers, treasurers, and accountants. 

Ripple’s move comes more than three months after it acquired treasury software provider GTreasury for $1 billion, one of several steps to grow the firm’s position in corporate finance.

Combining Ripple’s blockchain rails and GTreasury’s software, the new platforms goal is to simplify treasury operations. It eliminates settlement delays with payment times of three to five seconds and optimizes yield from working capital 24/7 through tokenized money market funds such as BlackRock’s BUIDL and overnight secure repo markets with RLUSD, according to a Tuesday blog post

Ripple Treasury also aims to provide “real-time cash positions, automated forecasting, and seamless reporting across traditional cash, digital assets, RLUSD, and XRP holdings,” the blog post stated.

Last year, Ripple filed its national banking license application with the US Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, while the firm’s subsidiary Standard Custody & Trust Company applied for a Federal Reserve master account, which would allow Ripple to hold RLUSD reserves directly with the Fed.

XRP has seen $2.4 billion in trading volume in the last 24 hours, increasing 1.8% in the period. The tokens all-time high was set in July 2025 at $3.65. Meanwhile, spot XRP ETFs had nearly $9.2 million worth of inflows on Tuesday, bringing cumulative inflows to $1.4 billion.

$82B

Crypto money laundering activity totaled more than $82 billion in 2025, more than 8x higher than 2020’s figure of $10 billion, according to a Tuesday report published by crypto analytics firm Chainalysis. Chinese-language networks dominated the ecosystem, accounting for roughly 20% of the illicit activity, or $16.1 billion, last year:

“Compared to other laundering endpoints, since 2020, inflows to identified CMLNs [Chinese-langugage money laundering networks] grew 7,325 times faster than those to centralized exchanges, 1,810 times faster than those to decentralized finance (DeFi), and 2,190 times faster than intra-illicit on-chain flows.”

Tom Keatinge, director at the Centre for Finance & Security at security think tank Royal United Services Institute, told Chainalysis that the rapid development of Chinese-language networks is an “an unforeseen consequence” of China’s imposition of capital controls.

“Wealthy individuals seeking to move money out of China and evade these controls provide the impetus and liquidity pool needed to service organized crime groups based in the West,” he noted.

Keatinge told Chainalysis, “The professional enablers of this capital flight provide the services necessary to match these two independent yet mutually beneficial needs.” 

Chinese-language networks offer six primary money movement techniques to clean dirty money, which include recruiting individuals to rent out their financial identities, selling illicit cryptocurrency at a discounted rate, and obscuring fund origins through multiple transactions. 

Overall, this Chinese ecosystem processed nearly $44 million per day last year. 

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Avalanche joins class of cryptocurrencies with at least one ETF

Investment management company VanEck on Monday introduced the first exchange-traded fund offering spot exposure to AVAX, the native token for the Avalanche blockchain and the latest cryptocurrency with an ETF. 

The new investment vehicle also aims to provide staking rewards for holders, according to the press release. AVAX, which has seen over $354 million in trading volume in the last 24 hours, is up slightly today. The token is trading at $11.70 as of 1:20 p.m. ET, a far cry from its all-time high of $144.96 in 2021. 

The nascent VanEck fund joins a group of its crypto-specific ETFs, including the firm’s bitcoin ETF, with $1.4 billion in total assets; its ethereum ETF, which holds $147.5 million; and its solana ETF, with assets totaling $27.9 million.

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